The Toothless Lion

In my professional life, I sometimes Zoom with international business consultants. A couple of weeks ago, I was on a Zoom with this very important business visionary, who was talking about the economic costs of latency.

If you were an international merchant or financier 200 years ago and you wanted a branch office in another country to do something, you had to send them a letter, so the latency period between your command and their response could be a matter of days, weeks, or even months. With digital communications, latency has been reduced to milliseconds, but it still levies costs—according to Google’s default AI, a hundred millisecond lag on an ecommerce website can reduce conversions by as much as 7 percent, costing companies millions in lost sales, reduced employee productivity, and more. They call it an invisible tax.

Clearly, there’s been a lot of latency between the markets’ assumptions about what’s going to happen to oil prices when the Strait of Hormuz reopens and what’s already happening in futures markets and what that means for MAGA and Trump. The fact that gasoline is likely to settle down at $5.00 a gallon and stay there, and that the cost of fertilizer and plastic and helium are all going to go through the roof, compounding the inflationary effects of Trump’s tariffs, hasn’t sunk in yet. If I was a speculator, I’m sure I could find all sorts of opportunities for arbitrage in the latency between those rosy expectations and the grimmer likelihood.

There’s a weird kind of political latency going on too, which is that Trump is not just a lame duck, but every bit as out of it as Biden seemed to be in 2024. While voters can see that and are giving public opinion surveyors an earful and far right influencers like Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones, MTG, and Fuentes are already jumping ship, the political class has yet to read the writing on the wall.

Chris Hayes gets it. I watched his show last night, and he couldn’t stop talking about how “checked out” Trump is. Iran has us over a barrel and is posting funny Lego memes about Trump and his family’s greed and cruelty, and he called a press conference to talk about the swimming pool finish he’s ordered his guys to put on the Reflecting Pool. That’s not just checked out—it’s deeply pathetic.

When I was a teenager, I washed dishes at this big, vulgar, over-priced restaurant on the Jersey Shore. The bosses were the owner’s two 30-something sons. The owner himself had gotten a bit doddering but still showed up some nights. One night when they were catering this big Mafia wedding, he came up to me and told me to stop throwing out the maraschino cherries that I was emptying out of the cocktail glasses I was feeding into the dishwasher and start saving them so they could be reused. As painfully shy as I was, I refused. Not only that, I told him what a disgusting idea it was. It didn’t even occur to me to pretend to respect him.

This morning, I see that Josh Marshall has a piece up at TPM in which he says that “Trump looks like the weak horse and no one wants to bet on or be associated with the weak horse.” All of a sudden he is a toothless lion, babbling on about his ballroom and his brilliance and his great victories and people are bored, bored, bored. Why it took so long to happen, I have no idea. He bored and disgusted me all the way back in the 1980s. But it’s getting to the point where someone could shoot him on Fifth Avenue and most people—including Russell Vought and Steven Miller—would breath a sigh of relief.

It hasn’t happened yet, but any minute now, an ambitious young male is going to challenge him and beat him decisively, leaving him to slink off into the wilderness and die somewhere alone. It’ll be sort of sad in a way.

We on the left have gotten so used to his inevitability that we can’t fully grasp just how bad things are going for him and MAGA. MAGA itself is just starting to wake up.

Pretty soon, we’re going to find out how strong Trumpism is without Trump.